Warm Pasta

In 2013, I interned with this middle-aged couple who worked to bring back Filipinos to their hometown after working overseas away from their families. They too had worked abroad for some time, in Italy, although they do not have children who they would have to leave behind. During the course of my internship, me and my two other classmates would drop by their house that was built to withstand weather changes, with vines growing in front of their window. They would cook pasta for us every single time, having brought home an Italian culture of hot pasta dinners. They are vegetarians but when they found out that we were feeding ourselves cereal for most of our stay in Manila, they went out of their way to cook us some pasta with beef.

When we arrived at their house, the pasta was just boiling, the sauce simmering, and by the time we sat down, they had just mixed both and served it on a shallow pan. The wife ordered her husband to get the forks ready as the table had not been set yet. She rolls her eyes with a smirk, looks at us and exasperatingly groans “men!” She then looks at me and corrects herself: “but not all men.” She smiles with a motherly smile and serves the pasta. “Quick! Before it gets cold!” and while we help ourselves she continues, “pasta must be served warm.”

I’ve learned to respect pasta since then. Cook pasta and take it out of the boiling water just before it becomes al dente—do not rinse—and toss it with the sauce. Toss, don’t stir. Pasta must be served warm.

In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I was transferred to Cotabato City. One important piece of information you need is that that place is devoid of options. Weeks after I had already started to become aware of the degradation of my mental health, I went to the grocery store to buy pasta. I’ve been to this grocery store many times before but I was there then for an indeterminate amount of time. There was no end in sight; all I saw was being there, option-less, for the rest of my life. I dragged my pushcart around the store, looking for fusilli, my favorite pasta shape, inspecting every aisle in case the staff had misplaced them and displayed them together with the toiletries. And so when I couldn’t find fusilli, after what seemed to the staff like a suspicious amount of time for a customer to be going through the entire store, I broke down in the middle of the aisle where the only pasta available was plain, old spaghetti.

I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder several weeks after that, after I had left Cotabato City for my hometown in Cagayan de Oro, confused and anxious, but resolute that I was never to live in that kind of fear of uncertainty. I was placed on medication a few months later when I returned to Manila by some fortunate twist of fate.

A year later, having gone through mood swings and a rise and fall of depression, my diagnosis was changed to what felt to me was a more accurate representation of how my head operates: persistent depression.

I told my psychiatrist and therapist that I had my first bout of depression in 2016 which lasted for almost a year. This one now, my doctor told me, was a recurrence and clinically more difficult to treat because I left that first long episode undiagnosed and untreated.

All told, I feel I’ve been depressed for much longer than I am capable of expressing. I’ve always loved being alone—eating out, watching movies, walks, cycling trips, the very comfort of my couch—and one can argue that that can go either way, that it predisposes me to depression or it allows me the experience to challenge my disease.

I feel that I will always be susceptible to depression, major, persistent or both (also called double depression; I learned this on WebMD, which my doctor will not be pleased to hear). But the difference now is, after going through proper treatment when my life had been at its worst state, I am no longer afraid of that uncertainty, with the awareness that all my darkest moments have always been followed by brighter days. And this time, I’m in a safe space where fusilli is available in abundance.